Western media used to be fast to record when it comes to the newest “crackdown” in China: a writing style referred to as “boys’ love.”
Chinese language media, too, has been being attentive to those occasions – however the image that emerges is much less of a sweeping crackdown and extra a localized phenomenon.
A long June 20, 2025, article in Nanfang zhoumo, or “Southern Weekly” – an influential and revered media outlet founded in Guangzhou – is going into really extensive element describing the new arrests through police within the northwestern town of Lanzhou.
It stories that government detained a number of younger ladies accused of benefiting from the newsletter of obscene subject matter, in particular on-line fiction within the style of “danmei,” or “boys’ love.” The thing additionally references a identical spate of arrests closing 12 months in Jixi county of Anhui province.
However nowhere does the thing point out that those arrests are consultant of the rest going down throughout the entire of China. As an alternative, the thing is going into element concerning the prison problems round makes an attempt through the Lanzhou police power to arrest folks outdoor their native jurisdiction.
As any individual who research Chinese language on-line tradition and its legislation through the Chinese language executive, I’ve spotted that headlines beginning with “China cracks down on …” are not unusual in Western media. Up to now few years, there’s been identical reporting about “crackdowns” on on-line influencers, superstar tradition and “sissy” boy bands.
Such reporting serves a function: Attributing all censorship to “China” reasonably than to a selected place of work or location throughout the huge nation strengthens the typical trust within the West that China is one, large totalitarian entity. From time to time this is correct, however frequently there may be extra to the tale.
Homosexual topics, immediately target market
Sure, Western media does usually revel in extra freedom than Chinese language media. However that doesn’t imply that Western retailers all the time workout that freedom. And now not each and every Chinese language “crackdown” is what it kind of feels.
Take the arrest of feminine writers of boys’ love fiction. The headlines within the West would make it appear that the crackdown is pushed through homophobia. This can be true, however calling this kind of fiction “gay erotica” isn’t correct.
Boys’ love is written predominately through ladies, for ladies.
Wikimedia Commons
Tales and novels that includes romantic or erotic relationships between males, authored through ladies for a readership that also is in large part feminine, have seemed in more than a few paperwork around the globe for many years.
The time period “boys’ love” – “BL” for brief – is normally used to explain the East Asian number of this literature.
The style has been round a minimum of because the overdue Nineteen Nineties and has won in reputation over the last twenty years.
Boys’ love fiction is normally written through ladies and skim through heterosexual ladies. That reality has sparked intensive dialogue, each amongst students and amongst practitioners and lovers, concerning the extent to which calling it homosexual erotica is suitable.
One argument by contrast labeling is that erotic fiction about male homosexuality in truth written through homosexual males for a homosexual male readership has a tendency to appear very other. Boys’ love tales have a tendency to give an idealized and unrealistic model of homosexual male sexual members of the family.
Certainly, Bucknell College East Asian research pupil Tian Xi has argued that “homosexualizing” boys’ love fiction is problematic, because it displays heterosexual ladies’s fantasies reasonably than the lived enjoy of homosexual males. Others have long past additional, labeling boys’ love “anti-gay.”
In China, the conflation of boys’ love with homosexuality has, to some degree, given extra social visibility to the homosexual neighborhood there. However it’s in doubt that the ladies who have been arrested this time would all comply with the label “gay erotica” to symbolize their writing – which poses the query: Why does Western media accomplish that in its reporting of the crackdown?
Books are large trade
So why are writers of this kind of fiction being arrested in China?
On-line fiction is huge trade in China, and Beijing has an financial and ideological passion in controlling the field.
Massive, Chinese language-based industrial web pages reminiscent of Qidian and Jinjiang Literature Town be offering get right of entry to to novels throughout a spread of standard genres. The preferred authors on this layout have made hundreds of thousands of bucks from now not handiest subscriptions, but in addition the sale in their highbrow belongings to the makers of on-line video games and TV sequence.
In step with a contemporary record compiled through researchers from the Chinese language Academy of Social Sciences, there have been greater than 36 million works of literature to be had on Chinese language web pages in 2023, together with 4 million or in order that were printed that 12 months.
The web studying sector used to be price round US$5.5 billion, whilst the marketplace for the highbrow belongings derived from on-line fiction used to be price some $27.5 billion.
Briefly: Chinese language literature generates large earnings, creates jobs and gives leisure. The Chinese language executive needs to beef up it and in addition sees it as a possible supply of cultural “soft power” to rival Eastern manga or South Korean boy bands.
Porn: A virus of capitalism
However from the Chinese language executive’s viewpoint, boys’ love literature – which persistently ranks as one of the standard genres, if now not the most well liked – poses an issue.
For ideological causes, Chinese language government need to suppress what they imagine “unhealthy” or obscene content material, even though it sells neatly. All kinds of pornography, homosexual and immediately, are thought to be an outbreak of capitalism for which there must be no position in socialist China.
A line of boys’ love books at Kinokuniya Book place in Japantown, San Francisco.
Wikimedia Commons
For the previous few years, government were a success in strong-arming the biggest web pages into tracking their very own content material to make certain that the rest erotic is considerably toned down, to the level that boys’ love fiction has disappeared from all of the ones websites, even though the style can nonetheless be discovered hidden in different classes.
Then again, there may be little that the Chinese language executive can do to forestall aspiring Chinese language erotica authors from publishing their writings on web pages outdoor its jurisdiction.
Disappearing instances
Issues can stand up for boys’ love writers after they receives a commission for his or her writing, and the ones bills are then remitted again into the rustic. The new arrests, as an example, seem to have concerned ladies who had printed their paintings at the Haitang portal in Taiwan and had won source of revenue from the ones works.
Haitang is understood for publishing a lot more specific boys’ love fiction than what can also be discovered on web pages in mainland China. The works in query have been almost definitely thought to be obscene through Chinese language government, and electorate who make cash from obscene publications are breaking Chinese language obscenity regulations.
In China, commentators have a tendency to peer those regulations as old-fashioned, each on account of the severity of the prescribed punishment – as much as 10 years in jail – and as the quantities of benefit thought to be unlawful are in response to source of revenue ranges from the Eighties.
Because the Southern Day by day article issues out, doubts concerning the high quality of the law in those instances have frequently induced judges to impose minimal sentences, in addition to many sentences being diminished on enchantment.
However vital grey spaces persist. Instances that draw in an excessive amount of media consideration, together with consideration from Western newshounds, frequently unexpectedly disappear from the radar. That’s what came about again in 2018, when a lady writing underneath the pseudonym Tianyi and her writer have been sentenced to greater than 10 years in jail for somewhat minor earnings made at the sale of a broadcast novel deemed to be “obscene” through government in Anhui province.
The case drew a large number of complaint in China. Western media used to be additionally everywhere it. However
what Western media failed to note used to be that, just one month later, an appeals court docket listening to used to be held. As a result of the large consideration the case had won within China, the listening to used to be livestreamed and watched through greater than 2 million other folks, however reputedly now not through a unmarried Western journalist.
They noticed the prosecutor admit that procedural errors were made within the unique trial and ask the pass judgement on to remand the case again to the decrease court docket.
Chinese language media extensively reported this flip of occasions. However after that there used to be silence. Was once the sentence modified? Did Tianyi and her writer ever move to jail? We don’t know.
That is the kind of censorship that I to find if truth be told relating to and that merits a lot more consideration – the instances that unexpectedly move silent and disappear from the pages of each Western and Chinese language media retailers.
